Data sharing has evolved a lot over the past few decades. The starting point was sending attachments via email, which allowed the sharing of data at the cost of manageability. Hundreds of emails with individual attachments are an administrative nightmare, and the introduction of the cloud has overcome this issue.
Now, services like the AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) make it far easier to share documents across the business. However, this is still complex, as you need to generate a shareable link and communicate it via instant messaging or emails. This often results in duplicate copies on servers or endpoint assets, taking up storage space and risking a breach. The ideal solution would be to make all the data holistically available with role-based access controls to govern data access and eliminate data duplication.
Thankfully, Snowflake has answered this industry call with its Snowflake Data Cloud service. Unlike other cloud data storage services, Snowflake Data Cloud is designed to allow frictionless data sharing without copying files or duplicating datasets. This means that an authorized data distributor can share a file access link without giving up custody of the data.
What Does Snowflake Data Cloud Offer?
There are numerous features available through the Snowflake Data Cloud platform, all built with security and accessibility. Let’s take a look.
Snowsight – This feature is designed for data analysts. You can execute queries or commands against Snowflake data sources. Examples of this include SQL query auto-completion, data collaboration, data visualizations and management dashboards.
Dynamic Data Masking – If you want to grant access to specific data entries, managing individual permissions is a huge task. By assigning data masking policies for particular datasets, you can set up things at one go and leverage role-based access controls through the Snowflake platform to govern data access. This masking allows authorized users to view data, without blanket restrictions on dataset access for those who are not authorized.
External Tokenization – Token assignment is essential for facilitating single-sign-on (SSO) functionality across your various business services. Snowflake natively supports external tokenization using OAuth through services like Okta, Microsoft Azure AD and Ping Identity PingFederate.
Data Search Optimization Service – Frequently accessed datasets require quick response times from your database service. Snowflake helps to improve performance with commonly queried datasets by caching specific SQL point lookup query results on large data tables.
Java UDF Support – Java User-Defined Functions (UDFs) allow you to extend functionality beyond what Snowflake offers natively through its UI. You can use both SQL and Javascript UDFs on Snowflake.
Data Exchange – This function allows you to securely share live datasets across business departments with external partners and stakeholders, and customers. Snowflake eliminates data silos with Data Exchange, empowering your internal and external users to securely access specific data entries without the need for duplication or file transfers.
Snowflake Data Marketplace – The Snowflake Data Marketplace allows data consumers to access a live copy of your datasets, without the need for duplication or file downloads to their device.
Level Up Your Cloud Data Warehousing with Snowflake and Trianz
With the advent of the Snowflake Data Cloud, enterprises have unprecedented functionality and control at their fingertips when managing their cloud data warehouse. Rather than sending files using the established file transfer protocol (FTP), or emailing attachments, Snowflake Data Cloud grants direct access to datasets without compromising security.
Data silos shouldn’t hold your business back. We have a close consulting partnership with Snowflake, and our experts can help you leverage this new functionality. Get in touch and discover how the Snowflake data warehousing platform can benefit your business.
